Of the people I asked about their perspectives on birth, everyone said that they did not want to think about having children for a long time. The two girls and three guys said they wanted to wait until they were in their thirties and the third guy said he wanted to wait until he was in his forties. The reasons for waiting ranged from wanting to have a good career to feeling like they need to have a lot of experience to be able to be good parents. They also said they would need to be making a good income because children cost a lot of money. They have seen what they cost their parents. One girl said she would not even want to have children unless she met someone she thought would be a great father. She also said she had read that early marriages especially with children usually end in divorce.
Regarding the stage of pregnancy the girls said they would not look forward to getting huge and being scared about the pain of childbirth. One girl said she thought that today when most women want to have a career and would also need to work for the family to have enough money having a baby is a huge decision and that it is a much bigger decision for a woman than for a man. The guys did not have much to say about the stage of pregnancy. One said he was glad he was male and did not have to worry about getting pregnant. A girl who heard him say this said, “I hope you are the subject of an experiment gone rogue and that you will be the first man to get pregnant. You won’t realize that you are pregnant until it is too late to have an abortion and you will be having triplets.”
Regarding avoiding getting pregnant, they all believed in being careful about birth control if they were in a serious relationship. Not one of them is in a serious relationship. They are also not against abortion. I asked if they thought it is more important for a baby to be wanted than to be born to a woman who was not ready to be a mother. They all thought it was important for a baby to be wanted. One girl said her parents are Catholic and that her mother is not against abortion even though her grandmother (her mother’s mother) is. No one thought that Roe vs. Wade should be reversed so that abortions would be illegal because women would continue to have them anyway. One of the girls knew that when abortions were illegal, there were dangerous abortions performed and some girlds died. One of the guys said that he didn’t think that men should be against abortion since they were not the ones who had to go through pregnancy and having a baby change their lives. When I said that having a baby should change the father’s life too, he said “Oh yeah. Guys our age and even five years older aren’t ready to be thinking about being dads." Obviously this makes birth control/abstinence highly important.
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